Today we’re going international, by which I do not mean Canada. My kickoff screening this morning had me reflecting, not for the first time, that India has the most photogenic poverty in the world. That’s because, like the rest of the country, it can’t help teeming with cultural energy. Take it from a State Department brat who remembers when Mumbai was Bombay that a lot of first-time Western visitors end up too agog to remember they ought to feel appalled.

It’s also what gives the first hour or so of director Danny (Trainspotting) Boyle’s new Slumdog Millionaire a genuinely Dickensian momentum. The social critic in Dickens always got stuck playing second fiddle to his appetite for zesty events and characters, and the same thing happens here. The hero is an orphaned slum kid from one of Mumbai’s humongous shantytowns who ends up as an unlikely contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? When he keeps getting the answers right, the producers arrange to have him charged with fraud and tossed into lockup.

But flashbacks while he’s being interrogated show us how he knows what he knows. Each question he’s answered successfully on the air triggers another learning moment from his turbulent formative years—and if you think there might be a metaphor lurking here for India’s 21st-century transformation from a country with more beggars than cars into a hi-tech get-rich-quick society, you’d be right. It’s not an accident that the picaresque protagonist has grown up to work as a gofer at one of those lilting-voiced telemarketing firms that the age of outsourcing has made us all familiar with.

The drawback of the clever—and hugely entertaining—flashback structure is that the movie loses not only steam but brains once we catch up to the present tense. Then all the plot strands get tied up in a commercial-minded climax that’s a lot more Gumpily effusive than India’s still far from idyllic reality deserves. Even so, most of what leads up to it is so flavorful that it’s hard to complain too much when Boyle finally comes..." />

Toronto Film Festival: Saturday, September 6

Today we’re going international, by which I do not mean Canada. My kickoff screening this morning had me reflecting, not for the first time, that India has the most photogenic poverty in the world. That’s because, like the rest of the country, it can’t help teeming with cultural energy. Take it from a State Department brat who remembers when Mumbai was Bombay that a lot of first-time Western visitors end up too agog to remember they ought to feel appalled.

It’s also what gives the first hour or so of director Danny (Trainspotting) Boyle’s new Slumdog Millionaire a genuinely Dickensian momentum. The social critic in Dickens always got stuck playing second fiddle to his appetite for zesty events and characters, and the same thing happens here. The hero is an orphaned slum kid from one of Mumbai’s humongous shantytowns who ends up as an unlikely contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? When he keeps getting the answers right, the producers arrange to have him charged with fraud and tossed into lockup.

But flashbacks while he’s being interrogated show us how he knows what he knows. Each question he’s answered successfully on the air triggers another learning moment from his turbulent formative years—and if you think there might be a metaphor lurking here for India’s 21st-century transformation from a country with more beggars than cars into a hi-tech get-rich-quick society, you’d be right. It’s not an accident that the picaresque protagonist has grown up to work as a gofer at one of those lilting-voiced telemarketing firms that the age of outsourcing has made us all familiar with.

The drawback of the clever—and hugely entertaining—flashback structure is that the movie loses not only steam but brains once we catch up to the present tense. Then all the plot strands get tied up in a commercial-minded climax that’s a lot more Gumpily effusive than India’s still far from idyllic reality deserves. Even so, most of what leads up to it is so flavorful that it’s hard to complain too much when Boyle finally comes out and admits he’s telling a fairy tale.

In Mexico, by contrast, it still seems just about impossible for any serious filmmaker to tackle his or her society without raising the topic of class privilege, no matter how obliquely. Despite its in-your-face title, Gerardo Naranjo’s Voy a Explotar (translated as I’m Gonna Explode) may do so a tad too obliquely for audiences to get the drift until they’ve had a chance to think about it. The real point of this Romeo and Juliet update is that the boy—a wealthy right-wing legislator’s son—is only playing at rebellion before he ends up just like Dad. The girl, who comes from less cushy surroundings, thinks he really means it—and that’s her tragedy. The problem is that Naranjo is a lot better at working out this theme through subtle visual cues and parallels than he is at figuring out incidents likely to keep us interested in the plot, such as it is. For long stretches, the movie is just too static for its own good. It sure is fun to talk about afterward, though.

Since it starts with one mob rubout and builds to another whose pathetic victims leave us heartsick, with a thoroughgoing expose of the Mafia’s operations in modern-day Naples in between, holding our interest is not a big worry for Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah. Derived from a fact-based novel by a journalist who spent time under police protection for all the beans he spilled, it’s very much in the vein of Traffic, with multiple storylines that break down each stage of how organized crime does its thing. But for my money, it’s much better than Traffic; despite the reportorial clarity of Garrone’s hard-edged visual style, it’s epic enough under the skin to qualify as the ultimate anti-Godfather. If and when it gets the U.S. release it deserves, make tracks.

If Gomorrah puts today’s Italy under a microscope, Michael Winterbottom’s Genova is just the good old Italy where glum movie characters go to work out problems that wouldn’t seem anywhere near as picturesque if they’d just stayed the hell home in Chicago. Colin Firth, who’s gotten less tense on camera now that he’s started to age past being the perfect dreamboat for women frightened of rowing, plays some sort of academic—about all I’m sure of is that he doesn’t teach screenplay writing—who relocates his two cute daughters to the title city after their mother is killed in a car crash, confirming yet again that your best bet to have both parents live to a ripe old age on film is to have been homely as a child. The mildly supernatural angle is that the younger girl keeps seeing Mom (Hope Davis) amid the scenery, but she could just as easily be a lamppost or a gelato stand without much effect on the plot. Catherine Keener also turns up as one of Firth’s colleagues, and much as I love her, it’s getting depressing to watch her turn into the hippie Alison Janney. Can’t directors at least once give her something more challenging to do besides laughing that throaty laugh a moment before she looks all wistful at the recognition that life has passed her by?

Known for framing their studies of moral conflicts around lowlifes too brutalized to know a moral issue from a toothbrush until the light dawns, Belgium’s Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have been mainstays on the festival circuit for a while, and their last film, L’Enfant, won the Palme D’Or at Cannes two years ago. After their new one screened there in May, I heard grumbles from more than one crit about another dose of the same old-same old. But since I came to the brothers late myself, I thought Lorna’s Silence was just fine.

The heroine is a young Albanian immigrant who’s married a junkie for the sake of Belgian citizenship. She knows a payoff is in store once she’s got her papers and can turn around and do another immigrant the same favor—if, that is, the hubby she’s got will just clear the way by OD’ing. Instead, against her better judgment, she starts feeling sorry for him, which is bad news for the petty mobster who enlisted her in the scam and doesn’t want her to end up welshing.

It may go without saying that jovial the movie isn’t. Even so, the Dardennes are today’s most honorable champions of an idea of cinema that could be due for a comeback—namely, that one thing it’s good for is to show us the workings of parts of society that most of us in a position to afford tickets walk past every day without a second thought. Which might get you wondering—OK, until Mad Men comes on—just who’s really been brutalized.

It probably figures that the one Stateside-set movie on my list all day was all about internal exile. Shot on a budget that makes shoestrings look like a luxury, Barry Jenkins’s Medicine for Melancholy follows a mismatched-or-are-they pair of brainy young African American singles through the daylong aftermath of a one-night stand in San Francisco, never exactly Soul Central. As they get acquainted, learning that one thing they’ve definitely got in common is that they both like to bicker, issues of black identity play leapfrog with the age-old he’s-from-Mars-and-she’s-from-Venus routine. The set-up’s too schematic by half, but when was the last time you saw a movie whose biggest problem was how many interesting discussions it was trying to find room for? Anyhow, I’m looking forward to Jenkins’s next one as much as I bet Spike Lee isn’t. Spike always did like being the only one on the block.